


You're as Beautiful as the Day I Lost You

by fortunecookie



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies), Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Angst, Frostcup - Freeform, Hijack, M/M, Romance, Viking!AU, hiccup pines, httyd2, they find jack not valra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 08:44:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1812277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortunecookie/pseuds/fortunecookie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hiccup measures his life in units of ‘winters after Jack drowned’.</p><p>(The five winters Hiccup lost something, and the one winter he found something he thought he’d lost forever.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're as Beautiful as the Day I Lost You

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this amazing GIFset by RussetLeaves~ http://russetleaves.tumblr.com/post/87141181505/how-did-you-find-me-i-didnt-toothless-did

The first winter after, Hiccup loses his health. The cold creeps into the cracks of Hiccup’s mind until it the buried memories resurface, like near-drowned things gasping for remembrance. It makes his skinny bones ache. When Hiccup falls ill — an infection (of the heart, too, perhaps) — Stoick lights him the biggest fire Hiccup’s ever seen blazing in the house, but the warmth only makes him feel just alive enough to draw Jack over and over again. He does not go outside. One of his sketches goes astray — Jack, making a snow angel, with laughing eyes and a devious, full-toothed smile. Gobber, with his hook for a hand, slips it back in Hiccup’s book with such painstaking care - _as if it was alive -_ that Hiccup feels like he might cry.

 

* * *

 

The second winter after, Hiccup loses his talkativeness. He refuses to talk about ‘it’. In fact, anything related to boys in Berk with brown eyes and browner hair is off-limits. This turns out to be difficult to honor since the hail is so bad that year that the youngest troublemakers are banned from snow ball fights and resort to widespread pranking instead. The smirk-faced ringleader, a messy eight-year-old boy with a fondness for building snow forts, decides to sneak in the village kitchen and sprinkle fire salt over all the eggnog — it’s so stupid and so funny that to anyone who can remember, it shouts of _JackJackJack._ The eggnog is spicier than Firebreath Soup, and the older Vikings smile and whisper of nostalgic tales of how Jack single-handedly caused _that_ disaster way back when. Hiccup swallows it all - the entire blasted cup - and the burn makes him giggle. It tastes like guilt and nostalgia, rolled in one.

 

* * *

 

The third winter after, Hiccup loses his worship of all things Jack - or tries to. It’s been a thors-for-saken time since Jack died, and he figures he should move on. (He tried not to remember that it had been a thors-for-saken time since anyone other than Jack kissed him, too). For the Bash-a-Head-with-Slop Centennial Ceremony, he sings the old tune Jack hated, just so that Hiccup can remind himself that things Jack doesn’t - didn’t - like don’t have to be his dislikes, too. He’s his own person, and his decisions are solely his, and not influenced by the invisible, non-existent hand of a dead boy. Jack’s dead. It still haunts his dreams, sometimes, and he wakes up wanting cold hands to warm. Somewhere in between winter and spring, Jack’s sister asks Hiccup if he wants Jack’s old helmets and shields. Hiccup tells her to keep them. (He’s trying. He really is.)

 

* * *

 

 

The fourth winter after, he loses his virginity. Astrid kisses him under the full moon and smiles into his mouth all while interlacing their fingers. Somewhere within the hormones and the heaving he recognizes something and mutters, I’ve been here before. She just grins and says, well, we’ve never done kissing  _here_. Afterwards, when he’s curled up in his own bed and half-asleep, he recalls being pushed back against solid bark years ago, by a boy with strawberry lips and sinewy arms who hugged him and kissed him hard and promised him, _I’m not letting go. You shouldn’t listen to them._ The memory makes him hard, and he wants with a passion that makes him scared. (The next day he kisses Astrid again, harder.)

 

* * *

 

 

The fifth winter after, he loses his youth. Every puddle becomes a crystallized mirror, and when twenty-year-old Hiccup looks down at his shimmering reflection - taller, stronger, rougher (metal foot and camouflage mask) - he wonders fleetingly if Jack would ever recognize him flying miles above the ground when years before he couldn’t go sledding down the hill without screaming. If Jack was still here…would he…? Then, always without fail, as his speculations run away from him, Hiccup closes his eyes and tries to walk on and leave the past behind. Somehow a phantasmic pain tugs on more than his limbless leg. It doesn’t spear him, not anymore, but the pulls at his heartstrings. If there was any chance - any chance in the world - Hiccup would run for it, for Jack, damn the leg and whatever else. He knows that now after trying to forget. 

 

* * *

 

It’s the sixth winter after when Hiccup finds something unexpected. He flies off on Toothless because Stoick wants him to become chief, and sooner or later Astrid is expecting a proposal, besides pondering all that, he has to train the incoming batch of dragon riders. Strangely enough, Hiccup wants people to expect nothing out of him again. After an argument with his dad, he takes off and tries to clear his thoughts in the clouds by diving off Toothless’ back head first. His plans are going extraordinarily well, he thinks, considering it’s winter, but then the wind gets rough and Toothless has to race to rescue him before he crushes his bones on this ridiculously gigantic, pointed ice sculpture that makes his skin crawl. 

But there’s something else other than the curvature that’s causing his spine to tingle. The ice in front of him is perfect, transparent and cut so finely that Hiccup knows that there must be someone behind this architecture. But this is far from Berk or anywhere on the map. Maybe an ice dragon, or some spirit? The last five years have taught him that nothing is first what it seems. So he summons his courage and explores further - there’s a chamber inside, with icicles and pillars of packed-in snow. On a cube-table of ice are a littered assortment of knick-knacks: tiles from the forge’s roof, spare buckets, small wooden ships, and snow - so much snow that has spilled over the corners. Hiccup kneels down and runs his hand through it - it is as grainy as sand and chilled like windowpane frost. As he touches it it bursts - it frosts over the air in spirals, surrounding him in a mini-storm of color. It turns from white to black and then gold, and Toothless, startled, tries to bat it away. Instead it dissipates.

Hiccup has heard stories of who this might be - Jack Frost, the spirit that _his_ Jack was named after. 

There’s a swift gust of wind after the snow-sand falls away, but that could be his imagination. Then - a dying splatter of gold draws his attention to a shrouded object on the ground. Wasn’t that - but no, it couldn’t be - Jack’s sister had burned it, hadn’t she - no, it was real. It was real. 

Jack’s cape. The same cape he wore as he drowned.

“Jack? Jack Frost?” 

Hiccup can’t breath. It’s too much, the nearly being decapitated by the ice, the stress of entire-village-counting-on-you, the everything of missing someone who _just could maybe be here now._

Then, suddenly, there’s a roar of ice cracking. Hiccup is blinded by a radiant, pulsating light and when he lowers his hand from his eyes - 

He sees a boy.

This white-and-blue ghost stares back at Hiccup and starts to blush.

“How did you find me?” he asks quietly. 

_Is it the magic or Hiccup’s mind that is making the boy glow?_

“I - I - I didn’t, Toothless did,” Hiccup stares at him, mouth wide open.

 

_He’s…_

_The boy’s biting his pale lip, and he’s fidgeting with a staff._

_His jaw is shaped like the mast of the toy ships Hiccup had set sail to as a child._

_The boy’s hair is whiter than snow and his eyes are bluer than the aurora borealis._

_… beautiful._

 

“I know what you’re going to say,” the boy says, averting his gaze.

 

_Smooth skin and long legs that had raced him to the hills and back._

_Eyes that could light up every star in the sky if they just lit up like fireflies. (Be them brown or blue.)_

_He’s … Jack._

 

“Jack.” It comes out so raw, so guttural, so yearning, and so lost that it surprises them both.

Jack’s blue, blue eyes widen as Hiccup’s hand moves of its own accord to lightly stroke his frozen cheek.

“You’re as beautiful as the day I lost you.”

 

* * *

EPILOGUE 

 

The seventh winter after, or the first winter after he finds Jack (it all depends on how you look at it) Jack and Hiccup fall back into love. (Then again, they never really fell out of it.) Hiccup publicly reintroduces Jack to Berk as the guardian of winter and fun, and they catch up, tiptoeing carefully around each other at first as if they are skating on thin ice. There’s a delicateness in their dealings that mimics the flight of swans, and a polite reciprocity that feels both enlightening and stifling at once. Hiccup learns about what exactly happened in the six years Jack gained eternity, thought he was a gone ghost, and met Zeus Almighty (apparently, the Moon). Jack learns about dragons, the mess-up that is Hiccup and Astrid’s relationship after Jack declines becoming chief, and the missing leg. They argue, too, lots, and there’s snow fights and dragon duels that rival any two fighting Alphas you’ve ever seen. Gobber and Stoick just shake their heads and throw their hands up in the air. (Turns out Jack is a natural with little kids, though, so Hiccup doesn’t desert all his duties - he takes over miraculously well at the dragon training academy.)

Then, later, in the dark sometime between dusk and dawn of Jack’s ‘death anniversary’, something thaws and the truth starts to pour out of them, like a hand is twisting at their guts. In the dark near the woods, they slowly recount the heartbreak, the stupidness, the missing, and - actually, mainly the missing. 

It is less than an hour when Hiccup looks at Jack again, properly this time in the crisp nighttime of cicadas singing of possibilities. Jack - this wayward, ageless, beautiful boy who defended him from bullies when he was five, who now summons snow with a flick of his hand, who can fly using his heart and his head, who _the gods saved and gave back._

He feels that phantasmic pain again. 

This time it pulls him to Jack’s lips and they kiss, hungrily, as if the night isn’t still young.

Jack caresses the nape of his neck and laughs softly -

“You’re as beautiful as the day I lost you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Heads up to Big Four superfandom, pls check out my ROTBTD movie trailer here: http://youtu.be/UJJkBJ68zCY :)
> 
> Thanks for reading you magical snowflake ;D Comments appreciated - Tell me if you think I should write a parallel work from Jack's POV!


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